Biffing It

First day of classes on BYU campus and I want to get the semester off to a good start. I wake up at 7:00, trot down the stairs of my apartment complex, unlock my bike from its post, swing my leg over its frame, and head off down the street. Brisk air, legs pumping, wheels turning fast. Freedom. Approaching the intersection at 800 N and University, I go to get on the sidewalk to avoid the confusion I always feel as a cyclist pretending to be a motorized vehicle. My bike hits the lip of pavement separating the sidewalk from the road, my bike starts to wobble, and . . .

I biff it. Biff it good. My bike slips, I try hopelessly to keep it upright, I think desperately, “I’m not even wearing a helmet,” and bam! I hit the pavement. A fellow cyclist riding by on the other side of the street sees my demise and shouts out, “Are you okay?” Having not fully assessed my situation myself, all I can do is shout back a shaky “Yes?” and the cyclist rides on. I stand up and examine myself. Left elbow: bleeding. Quite a bit. Right knee: scraped, but not bleeding yet. It could have been much worse.

I walk my bike back home, elbow dripping blood, handlebars twisted out of alignment with my front tire. I walk into my apartment and show my roommate my battle wound, expecting her to laugh with me at the irony of a college senior who rides her bike almost every day for the sheer joy of it and hasn’t crashed it in at least ten years losing control over something as small as a one-inch difference in surface level. How does that even happen?

But she didn’t laugh. She exclaimed: “Oh my goodness! Are you okay? Did you hit your head? Is your bike all right?” And I thought, “What the heck? That crash was so pathetic, I thought the world would laugh at it along with me.”

But they didn’t. No one did. My parents, my siblings, friends, roommates, ward members. They all responded with genuine concern that carried no trace of amusement.

Why? How could they not laugh at the irony of someone my age, as experienced with bike riding as I am, crashing so easily?

But it seemed instead that they grasped the tragedy of someone – no matter the age or experience level – slamming to the ground at such a speed when not wearing even a helmet as protective gear.

And as I pondered their reactions, and how they differed from mine, I thought of the Savior and how His response to when I mess up so often differs from mine.

Because sometimes even at my experienced age, there comes a day when I unexpectedly fall. Days when the same situation I’ve dealt with over and over again and gotten really good at handling in a Christlike/professional/confident/whatever-adjective-you-want way rears its angry head yet again, and I think, “I’ve got this,” but somehow . . . I biff it. I biff it good.

And I know I’m not the only one. We all have experiences where something small throws us completely off. We lose our temper, we say something rude, we say the wrong thing, we don’t say anything at all, we know what we should do and we don’t do it – whatever it is, we do it wrong, and we can’t believe that at our age, with our level of experience, we could mess up so bad.

I’ve been there. On the mission, standing at the doorstep and someone answers. It’s my turn to do the door approach, and I freeze and words stumble out in a random order that vaguely makes sense but also vaguely makes it sound like I’m completely terrified. Or while teaching, and I think, “How do I begin a lesson without it feeling awkward?” and then five minutes later I realize that I jumped straight into the lesson without giving How to Begin Teaching even a passing thought. Because even though I’ve been doing the same thing over and over again for the past year of my life, sometimes my mind goes blank and . . . I biff it. Biff it good.

Or now, back to civilian life, and I think: How do I make friends? How do I make small talk? How do I motivate myself to do homework when I have no desire to do it? I thought I had this all figured out before the mission, but now things have changed – I’ve changed – and the things that worked for me before don’t always work for me now. And over and over again I wonder: How do I this without falling?

And while I’m slowly figuring it out, there are still those times when I hesitate and I stumble and . . . I biff it. Biff it good. Little things that I thought I had already figured out throw me off, and I feel my confidence in myself being slammed to the ground, feel it as it starts to bleed. And it’s not a comedy, and it’s not a tragedy, it’s pathetic and stupid and frustrating and I have no patience for it. Me, at my age, with my level of experience and hard work, acting like I’m still a college freshman? Please. Surely I can do better than that.

But then I had my experience with crashing my bike the first day of classes, and the reactions of my parents and siblings and friends surprised me. And maybe this is because I often compare my Father in Heaven’s love with the love I feel from all those Christlike souls around me, but suddenly I understood: Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ never view my falls as humorous or annoying. They view them as a tragedy. Not a tragedy, exactly, because there’s always the hope of a happy ending, and of course pain is an integral, needed part of life, but I know that when I don’t perform as well as I wish I had, they feel my pain. They feel my disappointment in myself – but they are not disappointed in me. They cry with me because they love me and they understand that, as a mortal being, I will fall. For reasons that I do not understand, I will crash that bike, and I will biff it. I will biff it good. And they are infinitely more concerned with how I am doing than with the crash. Am I okay? Is my heart all right? Did I hit any unprotected part of my soul? And I can just picture them hugging me, like a mother embracing her child who has just experienced her first scraped knee, and I know that they don’t judge me for not being perfect at something I thought I had perfected long ago.

And slowly I am learning to view my falls in the same way. Not as a comedy, not as an illustration of how pathetic I can be, but as something that hurts my soul of infinite worth, something deserving of a hug and a kiss to make it better, an incident when I have permission to feel the pain of crashing and still feel concern for myself and my well-being. Because more important than my circumstances is the way I respond to them, and only as I treat myself with love can I view those around me with the same depth of emotion. And isn't that what the gospel is all about? About seeing those around us as a whole being and being concerned, not with their weaknesses and imperfections, but with their emotions and their needs and how to help them know their worth and their potential and how they can work to achieve it? 

That involves loving them as they fall. Not judging them, not thinking less of them, not arrogantly wondering how in the world they could manage to fail at something so simple, but seeing them at their center and wanting them to find joy. And to feel that way towards others, we must first start with feeling that way towards ourselves.